Saturday, August 12, 2017

"How Information Got Re-Invented"

From Nautil.us:

The story behind the birth of the information age.

With his marriage to Norma Levor
over, Claude Shannon was a bachelor again, with no attachments, a small
Greenwich Village apartment, and a demanding job. His evenings were
mostly his own, and if there’s a moment in Shannon’s life when he was at
his most freewheeling, this was it. He kept odd hours, played music too
loud, and relished the New York jazz scene. He went out late for
raucous dinners and dropped by the chess clubs in Washington Square
Park. He rode the A train up to Harlem to dance the jitterbug and take
in shows at the Apollo. He went swimming at a pool in the Village and
played tennis at the courts along the Hudson River’s edge. Once, he
tripped over the tennis net, fell hard, and had to be stitched up.

His
home, on the third floor of 51 West Eleventh Street, was a small New
York studio. “There was a bedroom on the way to the bathroom. It was
old. It was a boardinghouse ... it was quite romantic,” recalled Maria
Moulton, the downstairs neighbor. Perhaps somewhat predictably,
Shannon’s space was a mess: dusty, disorganized, with the guts of a
large music player he had taken apart strewn about on the center table.
“In the winter it was cold, so he took an old piano he had and chopped
it up and put it in the fireplace to get some heat.” His fridge was
mostly empty, his record player and clarinet among the only prized
possessions in the otherwise spartan space. Claude’s apartment faced the
street. The same apartment building housed Claude Levi-Strauss, the
great anthropologist. Later, Levi-Strauss would find that his work was
influenced by the work of his former neighbor, though the two rarely
interacted while under the same roof.

Though the building’s
live-in super and housekeeper, Freddy, thought Shannon morose and a bit
of a loner, Shannon did befriend and date his neighbor Maria. They met
when the high volume of his music finally forced her to knock on his
door; a friendship, and a romantic relationship, blossomed from her
complaint.

Maria encouraged him to dress up and hit the town. “Now this is
good!” he would exclaim when a familiar tune hit the radio on their
drives. He read to her from James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, the latter his
favorite author. He was, she remembered, preoccupied with the math
problems he worked over in the evenings, and he was prone to writing
down stray equations on napkins at restaurants in the middle of meals.
He had few strong opinions about the war or politics, but many about
this or that jazz musician. “He would find these common denominators
between the musicians he liked and the ones I liked,” she remembered. He
had become interested in William Sheldon’s theories about body types
and their accompanying personalities, and he looked to Sheldon to
understand his own rail-thin (in Sheldon’s term, ectomorphic) frame.

A
few Bell Labs colleagues became Shannon’s closest friends. One was
Barney Oliver. Tall, with an easy smile and manner, he enjoyed scotch
and storytelling. Oliver’s easygoing nature concealed an intense
intellect: “Barney was an intellect in the genius range, with a
purported IQ of 180,” recalled one colleague. His interests spanned
heaven and earth—literally. In time, he would become one of the leaders
of the movement in the search for extraterrestrial life. Oliver also
held the distinction of being one of the few to hear about Shannon’s
ideas before they ever saw the light of day. As he proudly recalled
later, “We became friends and so I was the mid-wife for a lot of his
theories. He would bounce them off me, you know, and so I understood
information theory before it was ever published.” That might have been a
mild boast on Oliver’s part, but given the few people Shannon let into
even the periphery of his thinking, it was notable that Shannon talked
with him about work at all.

The answer to noise is not in how loudly we speak, but in how we say what we say.

John
Pierce was another of the Bell Labs friends whose company Shannon
shared in the off hours. At the Labs, Pierce “had developed a wide
circle of devoted admirers, charmed by his wit and his lively mind.” He
was Shannon’s mirror image in his thin figure and height—and in his
tendency to become quickly bored of anything that didn’t intensely hold
his interest. This extended to people. “It was quite common for Pierce
to suddenly enter or leave a conversation or a meal halfway through,”
wrote Jon Gertner.

Shannon and Pierce were intellectual sparring
partners in the way only two intellects of their kind could be. They
traded ideas, wrote papers together, and shared countless books over the
course of their tenures at Bell Labs. Pierce told Shannon on numerous
occasions that “he should write up this or that idea.” To which Shannon
is said to have replied, with characteristic insouciance, “What does
‘should’ mean?”

Oliver, Pierce, and Shannon—a genius clique, each
secure enough in his own intellect to find comfort in the company of
the others. They shared a fascination with the emerging field of digital
communication and co-wrote a key paper explaining its advantages in
accuracy and reliability. One contemporary remembered this about the
three Bell Labs wunderkinds:

It
turns out that there were three certified geniuses at BTL [Bell
Telephone Laboratories] at the same time, Claude Shannon of information
theory fame, John Pierce, of communication satellite and traveling wave
amplifier fame, and Barney. Apparently the three of those people were
intellectually INSUFFERABLE. They were so bright and capable, and they
cut an intellectual swath through that engineering community, that only a
prestige lab like that could handle all three at once.

Other
accounts suggest that Shannon might not have been so “insufferable” as
he was impatient. His colleagues remembered him as friendly but removed.
To Maria, he confessed a frustration with the more quotidian elements
of life at the Labs. “I think it made him sick,” she said. “I really do.
That he had to do all that work while he was so interested in pursuing
his own thing.”

Partly, it seems, the distance between Shannon
and his colleagues was a matter of sheer processing speed. In the words
of Brockway McMillan, who occupied the office next door to Shannon’s,
“he had a certain type of impatience with the type of mathematical
argument that was fairly common. He addressed problems differently from
the way most people did, and the way most of his colleagues did. ... It
was clear that a lot of his argumentation was, let’s say, faster than
his colleagues could follow.” What others saw as reticence, McMillan saw
as a kind of ambient frustration: “He didn’t have much patience with
people who weren’t as smart as he was.”....